[PDF]The Prairie A Tale

T H E PRAIRIE: A Talc





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JAMES FENDIORE COOPER



INTRODUCTION


BY HENRY NASH SMITH








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fiLLONfi 'iSfflL LIBRARY





Second Printing, February, 1953


Introduction copyright, 1950, by Henry Nash Smith
Typography and Cover Design by Stefan Salter
Printed in the United States of America






















INTRODUCTION TO


T II E P R A I R I E



James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series consists of
five novels divided chronologically into an earlier group of three
(The Pioneers, 1823; The Lost of the Mohicans, 1826; and The
Prairie, 1827) and a later group of two (The Pathfinder, 1840;
and The Dcerslayer, 1841). The series is loosely unified by the fact
that all the novels deal with exploits of the same scout and hunter
at various periods, from the 1750’s, when he is represented as
being a young man, to his death in 1806.

The tales were valued formerly for their depiction of thrilling
adventure in the wilderness, and in the course of time they have
come to be thought of as books for children. But the critics who
have been revaluing American literature during the past thirty
years have rediscovered in Cooper a passionate concern with the
problem of society in the United States which had been obscured
by his narrative verve and his old-fashioned rhetoric. We now re¬
alize that beneath their “bent-twig” surface of adventure and war¬
fare the Leatherstocking Tales embody a serious and even profound
• •

inquiry into the influence of the frontier experience on the Ameri¬
can character.

From this newer standpoint The Last of the Mohicans, which
is the best known of the novels, seems less interesting than some
of the others. Cooper’s own favorite, The Prairie, has fared espe¬
cially well in the process of reassessment. It is a rich and complex
book. As the old trapper approaches death he looks back over
the whole of his long life, and these reminiscences give amplitude
to the narrative. The geographical perspective of the setting be-


v



yond the Mississippi encourages reflections on the Westward
Movement in general. And Ishmael Bush the squatter is, except
for Leatherstocking, the most impressive character in the entire
series.


II

Cooper’s daughter Susan said that the idea of transporting
Leatherstocking to the Far West came to her father while he was
writing The Last of the Mohicans in 1825. There were several
reasons why such an idea was likely to occur to him at this time.
The narrative of the expedition of Major Stephen H. Long up the
Platte River to the Rocky Mountains had been published in 1823,
and Cooper read this book with care. The early 1820s were a
brilliant period in the exploration of the trans-Mississippi. Fur
traders operating out of St. Louis, especially Jedediah Smith and
Thomas Fitzpatrick, began to penetrate beyond the continental
divide into the Wind River country of Wyoming in 1823. Their
associate William H. Ashley organized the first of the famous
annual rendezvous of mountain men in the Green River Valley
in 1825. These events were noticed in newspapers and Cooper may
have read about them. During the spring of 1826 or earlier, Cooper
met a young Pawnee chief named “Peterlasharroo” or “Peta-
lasharoo” who had come east with a delegation of Indians at the
invitation of the government. In his Notions of the Americans,
published in 1828, Cooper describes this Indian with evident ad¬
miration, and we have no reason to question Susan Cooper’s state¬
ment that Petalasliaroo was the model for Hard-Heart, the Pawnee
chief in The Prairie.

On June 1, 1826, Cooper sailed for Europe with his wife, his
five children, and three servants. He took with him the partially
oompleted manuscript of his new novel and finished it in a house
he rented for his family in Paris. Thus while he was writing the
later chapters of the story he was making his entrance into
Parisian society. During this period he received a flattering visit
from Walter Scott, and Mrs. Cooper’s letters mention dinners and


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receptions on a scale that indicates how great her husband s Euro¬
pean fame had already become.

Since Cooper had never been within a thousand miles of the
region in western Nebraska or Wyoming which he chose as the
setting for The Prairie , he was forced to rely heavily on books
for his descriptions both of the landscape and ot Plains Indian life
and customs. He took a few details from the narrative of the Lewis
and Clark expedition, such as the names Mahtoree and Weucha
for Sioux chiefs, and the ferocity ot the “white bears to be en¬
countered at the Falls of the Missouri in present Wont ana. T. he
achievement of Lewis and Clark also suggested to him the his¬
torically improbable claim that Leatherstocking had visited the
Pacific coast before the Louisiana Purchase.

The novelist made much greater use ol the narrative of the Long
expedition, which was ably compiled by Dr. Edwin James. 11 is
reliance on this book is so extensive as to suggest that he must
have taken it to Paris with him, and often composed with it lying
open on the desk before him. The “chilling dreariness” of the
landscape of the High Plains; the curiosity and zeal of the scien¬
tists attached to the expedition, including the editor, which sug¬
gested the characterization of Dr. Obed Bat; the appearance of
the Pawnee and Sioux villages and of a buffalo herd; the name
Hard-Heart for the Indian hero (borrowed from an Ioway chief
who figures prominently in James’s account); the constant refer¬
ences to Wahcondah and the Master of Life; the rhythms and
metaphors of Indian oratory; the scientific terms used by Dr. Bat
in describing a grizzly bear and the imaginary Vcspertilio hor-
ribilis —these are only a part of the materials which Cooper found
in James’s narrative.

Although the Pawnees and Sioux are given costumes, weapons,
and habits according to Cooper’s reading of the reports of such
Western travelers, they resemble in character the virtuous Dela¬
wares and the treacherous Mingoes of The Last of the Mohicans,
whom Cooper had patterned upon John Heckcwvelder’s Account
of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who
Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the NeigJiboring States (1819).


vn



Leatherstocking’s love for Hard-Heart parallels his earlier devo¬
tion to Uncas.

The genteel hero and heroine, Captain Duncan Middleton and
Inez de Certavallos, are the conventional lay figures which can be
found in virtually all Cooper’s novels. Although he sincerely be¬
lieved in the superiority of such aristocrats, he was unable to
portray them convincingly because he could never free his literary
treatment of them from the conventions of the sentimental novel.
The backwoods characters—Paul Hover of Kentucky and the
Ishmael Bush group, who are natives of Tennessee—are much
more vividly drawn, apparently from firsthand observation of the
settlers among whom Cooper grew up in Cooperstown.


Ill

From the standpoint of the “realism” that came to dominate
American fiction later in the century, the plot of The Prairie is
absurd. It is true that the Indians are displayed in an appropriate
setting and engage in plausible activities, and only a minor stretch
of probability is needed to bring Leatherstocking to the upper
Platte by a westward extension of Daniel Boone’s migration to
Missouri in the 1790s. But the Bush family and the two pairs
of lovers are brought out to the Great Plains by an exceedingly
flimsy pretext. Cooper’s standard resource for introducing a dis¬
tressed heroine to the wilderness, her abduction by a villain, is
unconvincing in this instance because the reader cannot under¬
stand how Abiram White proposes to collect a ransom from the
husband and father of Inez if he takes her hundreds of miles be¬
yond the frontier to an area from which he could never hope to
establish communication with them. By the side of this irration¬
ality the unexplained mystery of Paul Hover’s secretive pursuit
of the Bush wagon train is merely a detail.

But it is a mistake to analyze The Prairie in these terms. A
generation that has witnessed a revolt against realism need not
begrudge Cooper the privilege of grouping his characters to
achieve certain effects without bothering too much over external


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details of motivation. He wants four groups of characters brought
into contact with one another in the West and he puts them there
with a kind of imaginative arbitrariness. Furthermore, he treats
the portion of the Plains in which the action takes place as if it
were an Elizabethan stage, a neutral space where any character
may be brought at a moment's notice without arousing in the
audience a desire to have the entrance accounted for. Within this
space Cooper maneuvers his characters into the situations he de¬
sires. Once his effect has been achieved he resorts to a quick and
equally arbitrary manipulation of the plot for the sake of another
effect. Although the capture of Leatherstocking and his com¬
panions by the Sioux in Chapter III is prepared for by a careful
build-up of suspense, their escape in Chapter Y is handled very
casually, to say the least. A second escape, in Chapter XXI, seems
due to a wandering of attention on the part of the guards. And
on a third occasion, in Chapter XXIX, Leatherstocking is able
to saunter over and, unnoticed, cut the bonds that secure Paul
Hover while a corps dc ballet of aged squaws is engaged in a pre¬
paratory scalp dance. A reader who allows himself to be annoyed
by this impressionism, as Mark Twain was annoyed by an Indian
fight in The Deerslayer, 1 will not be able to do justice to Cooper’s


real merits, which lie in another direction.

An analysis of the structure of The Prairie reveals that Cooper
works from one to another of a series of sharp visual images con¬
ceived as if they were paintings lacking the dimension of time.
These moments of stasis are interlarded with spurts of violent
action (pursuit, capture, the buffalo stampede, the prairie fire, the
fight between Sioux and Pawnees, the single combat of Mahtoree
and Hard-Heart on the sand of the island in the river) and with
long debates between Leatherstocking and Obed Bat, or among
the parliamentary orators of the Sioux council. Several of the
tableaux in The Prairie are among the most effective passages in
Cooper. The first appearance of Leatherstocking to the astonished
Ishmael Bush, a dark figure towering against the sunset sky, and


1 In ‘‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”



the scene of his death at the end of the story have been praised
by the critics, but they are no more remarkable than the first
appearance of Hard-Heart or the carefully drawn landscape which
serves as a backdrop for Ishmael Bush’s primitive court of justice
after the defeat of the Sioux by the Pawnees. One of the best
examples is the “wild and striking” scene which Cooper pauses to
establish when the Bush family comes to the thicket that conceals
the body of Ishmael’s murdered son:

The heavens were, as usual at the season, covered with dark, driv¬
ing clouds, beneath which interminable flocks of aquatic birds were
again on the wing, holding their toilsome and heavy way towards
the distant waters of the south. The wind had risen, and was once
more sweeping over the prairie in gusts, which it was often vain to
oppose; and then again the blasts would seem to mount into the
upper air, as if to sport with the drifting vapor, whirling and rolling
vast masses of the dusky and ragged volumes o-^er each other, in a
terrific and yet grand disorder. Above the little brake, the flocks of
birds still held their flight, circling with heavy wings about the spot,
struggling at times against the torrent of wind, and then favored by
their position and height, making bold swoops upon the thicket,
away from which, however, they never failed to sail, screaming in
terror, as if apprised, either by sight or instinct, that the hour of
their voracious dominion had not yet fully arrived.

As the sons of Ishmael whistle the dogs into the brush and prepare
to follow them:

The vultures and buzzards settled so low as to flap the bushes with
their heavy wings, and the wind came hoarsely sweeping along the
naked prairie, as if the spirits of the air had also descended to wit¬
ness the approaching developement.

Presently the searchers reappear bearing the body of their brother:

The flight of birds wheeled upward into the heavens, filling the air
with their complaints at having been robbed of a victim which,
frightful and disgusting as it was, still bore too much of the impres¬
sion of humanity to become the prey of their obscene appetites.



The passage contains many clumsy touches—“as usual at the
season,” for example, is an irrelevancy apparently suggested by
Cooper’s need to sustain his own belief in a scene which he was
not reporting at first hand; it is unimportant whether the birds
were led to break off their swoops by sight or instinct; and “the
hour of their voracious dominion” is in the vein of inflated rheto¬
ric to which Cooper often resorts when he is fumbling toward
euphemism. One may also object to adjectives like “terrific” and
“grand,” with which the author commands the reader to feel a
certain way instead of causing him to feel so through appeal to
the imagination. The spirits of the air are undoubtedly too Gothic,
and the passage as a whole is strained and overloaded. But it
comes off nevertheless. Here as often the brute integrity of Coop¬
er’s intention triumphs over flaws of language and even of taste.

The same may bo said of the great scene of the novel, Ishmael’s
hanging of Abiram White in punishment of Asa’s murder (Chapter
XXXII). The symbolism of the setting is too obvious, yet the
visual effect reinforces the impending action to a remarkable de¬
gree :


Ishmael chose a spring that broke out of the base of a rock some
forty or fifty feet in elevation, as a place well suited to the wants of
his herds. The water moistened a small swale that lav beneath the
spot, which yielded, in return for the fecund gift, a scanty growth of
grass. A solitary willow had taken root in the alluvion, and profiting
by its exclusive possession of the soil, the tree had sent up its stem
far above the crest of the adjacent rock, whose peaked summit had
once been shadowed by its branches. But its loveliness had gone with
the mysterious principle of life. As if in mockery of the meagre show
of verdure that the spot exhibited, it remained a noble and solemn
monument of former fertility. The larger, ragged, and fantastic
branches still obtruded themselves abroad, while the white and hoary
trunk stood naked and tempest-riven. Not a leaf nor a sign of vege¬
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